Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday November 19, 2012 @02:13PM
from the easy-now dept.

concealment writes "On November 27, RapidShare will start putting a tight cap on outbound downloads for its free users. Paid members will still have 30 gigabytes in outbound downloads per day, but everybody else will be capped at one gigabyte. The change is expected to further deter pirates from using RapidShare to distribute copyright material on a large scale."

It might be a money grab. But riddle me this, holy Antisharkspray.
Legit services will do this to you:

Steam will cut you off of your sizeable and paid for and possibly extensive games library simply for moving into another region.
Amazon will cut you off of your whole Kindle library simply for moving into another region.

This is not even for real but only contractual law since publishing rights still honour the outmoded notion of country borders.
Would you accept if you were to move to Europe to forfeit everything you ever bought on Kindle, Steam, or any other sevice?

Copyright stuff has moved beyond the usual 100 years after creator's death + Disney shenanigans into the crazy realm of publishing rights into however the world got carved up into publishing rights areas.

I for one have deDRMed my whole Kindle-bought Batman collection just in case I might want to move away and if I put it onto Rapidshare just to protect my investment then it shouldn't be viewed as outlawnessnessitude but a failure of copyright law. Took me a whole weekend. Which in turn made me realise I spend too much on Batman.
Also, Batman.
Copyrightpublisherlaw shouldn't stand a chance of a snowball in hell but it instead thrives like The Penguin in Nomansland. How come?
Comply?
COMPLY!

Sorry, try as I might, the pirates offer the better service.

While I deDRMed my Batman collection I went on search for my favourite childhood radio show. Amazon had an offer for the first 4 shows of 40. The second episode cost 30€ from "affiliiates". Nada, zip, zilch for the next 36 episodes. So I went for another online shop. Same misery, less cutthroat. 36 episodes not published. And even if they were, it still would have been 10€ per episode. Pay 400€ for stuff I recorded from radio to tape as a kid? I could afford that but guess who took to Teh Mighty Internets to torrent that stuff from kids who managed to have backups of their old tapes? Worse even still, the originals got lost and they tried to restore it from amateurs who still had recordings in their attic.

Current copyright reality is worse than the fire in the Library of Alexandria. Copy that floppy and shoot a lawyer.

I beg of you, just because somebody carved up the world into publishing areas and only stuff that will offer short term yield will get archived(read: put into the back catalogue) copy the hell out of that stuff. Future generations will thank you.

Incidentally by the way, at the modern Library of Alexandria resides the mirror of the Internet Archive.

You are not alone in commenting about the service. Valve's Gabe Newell has said "In general, we think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem."

Steam will cut you off of your sizeable and paid for and possibly extensive games library simply for moving into another region.
Amazon will cut you off of your whole Kindle library simply for moving into another region.

It gets worse than that. I was on vacation in Germany last month, and had a couple extra hours to kill at the hotel one night. So I fired up my Amazon Prime account to watch some movies on Amazon instant video. Not authorized in the area. Same with Netflix and Hulu.

I had to run an SSH proxy through one of my web hosting servers to trick these services into thinking I was still in the U.S., but very few people know how to and have the resources to do that. This whole anachronistic distribution and publishing rights by region has got to die. I try to be a legit customer, paying for my movies and music. But if this is what's going to happen, I'm ripping everything I buy and making my own copies regardless of what silly laws they get passed. If I can't bypass the DRM, I'm downloading the pirated version of my legitimately bought media.